Tichys working methods have little to do with conventional artistic praxis. His camera at the ready, he would observe the daily round of the female population of his native town, in a matter of seconds snapping shots from his hip, and instantly concealing the strange device again. The result of those forays are shots of women at the market, in the swimming pool, at work, in pubs, in the streets and public squares…

The genesis of Miroslav Tichý‘s (b.1926) remarkable photographic works was in the little town of Kyjov, southern Moravia. Dissapointed by the rejection of his works and rising state sensorship, Tichý abandoned his formal studies of drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague shortly after the Communist take over in 1948. He returned home to live a life of artistic solitude, focusing instead on his favorite motif, women. Over the next thirty years, with homemade cameras in hand, Tichý managed to produce a body of unique mixed media works, that yielded not only his perchant for voyeuristic fantasy, abstraction and embellishment, but also an innate understanding of the painterly potential locked with in the photographic medium…

Tichý is truly one of the great finds of unknown artists who worked on the outside edges of the art world. Following the Communist takeover, Tichý spent some eight years in prison camps and jails for no particular reason other than he was different and was considered subversive…